xpedition would fall upon the British
tax-payer.

I am, Sir, Yours, etc., (Rev.) AMOS BLICK.

* * * * *

AMENDING A BILL.

As the drought wore on to its third day I began to perceive that
siphoning the pinks with soda-water out of the dining-room window was
insufficient to meet the crisis. I rang up the nearest fire station and
told them in my most staccato tones that the garden was being burnt to a
cinder and would they please--but they rang off suddenly without making
a reply. It was then that I had a bright idea--so bright that the
thermometer which was hanging near my head went up two degrees higher
still.

"Araminta," I cried (she was out on the lawn tantalising a rose-bush
with a kind of doll's-house watering-can),--"Araminta, where does one go
to get hose?"

Araminta bridled.

"I didn't mean that," I said, hastily coming out of the French-window to
explain. "I meant the kind of long wiggly thing you fix on to a tap at
one end and it squirts at the other."

She unbridled prettily. "Oh, that!" she said. "Altruage's have them, I
suppose. Altruage's have everything. But I shouldn't get one if I were
you. I believe they're fearfully expensive, and I'm going to buy a
proper watering-can this morning."

My mind, however, was made up. "Expense," I thought, "be irrigated!" I
said nothing about it to Araminta, but I decided to act.

* * * * *

The sun was still blazing with abominable ferocity at half-past twelve
when I crossed the threshold of the Taj Mahal Stores and button-holed
the first peripatetic marquis I could find.

"I want," I said, mopping my brows with the disengaged hand, "to see
some hose."

"Certainly, Sir," he replied with a beaming smile. "For wear on the
feet, I presume?"

"Not at all," I replied as coolly as possible. "For shampooing the
head."

He looked puzzled.

"I want it to water my pinks with," I explained.

A look of divine condescension overspread his features. "Ah, you require
our horticultural department for that, Sir," he said. "Fourth to the
left, fifth to the right, and ask again." And with an infinitely
horticultured gesture of the hand he motioned me on.

After a long and adventurous Odyssey and fifteen fruitless appeals I
sighted a kind of green island shore, where a young man stood in an
attitude of _hauteur_, surrounded by a number of pink and grey snakes
and brightly coloured agricultural machines.

Making my wa